Caterer Jennifer Rubell Ascends to Food Artist

Aside from Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper, one of the most famous artworks of all time, food is an under-explored subject in art, especially in comparison with how much of our daily lives it occupies. Artist Wayne Thiebaud is probably the most renowned contemporary painter of food, but the work is predominantly lushly frosted cakes. Claes Oldenburg has done a lot of soft-sculptures—a hamburger, French fries, and ice-cream cones among them—but no one has really made real food into an art form. And aside from a particularly elaborate centerpiece, the catering at museum galas (which are rife in the spring in New York) infrequently ascends to something that qualifies as spectacle.

Last Thursday night at the Brooklyn Museum's gala, however, Jennifer Rubell changed all that. She staged a series of "happenings" that elevated her art medium—food and drink—into an interactive bacchanal that was truly lavish. The Harvard University–educated daughter of Don and Mera (the Rubells, of Miami's renowned art-hoarding dynasty) certainly piled a lot onto her plate in her four-month preparation for the gala. The outcome was a display that referenced seminal artists and artworks. Rubell must have been breast- and spoon-fed a steady diet of art from infancy, as child-like eating rituals were the norm at the museum, with the hands of the 600 participants the predominant utensil.Drinks were dispensed from large, minimal canvases, each with a spigot, which Rubell calls "Drinking Paintings." The museum wall labels specified the concoctions each of the "paintings" dispensed and the medium of which they were made. The works were references to "drips" common to Abstract Expressionism, but I found the canvases more akin to leaking unprimed Robert Ryman paintings. Revelers filled their glasses to their hearts' content—and to their livers' discontent. I saw no shortage of people topping up Mason jars with dirty martinis, which was one of the first canvases to run dry. Screwdrivers, rum and Coke, and white wine were also on tap.

Artist Bruce Nauman provided inspiration for the cheese-and-crackers portion of the party, but this was light years away from the cheese-cubes-and-saltines variety we all know. Rubell told me she tried no fewer than 10 cheeses until she could find the perfect fontina to suspend 10 feet above a wooden slab. The 12 life-size cheeses, which she intrepidly cast from her own head, remained solid until they were blasted with heat guns, at which point the melting cheese dripped down onto sculptural stacks of crackers. When the heads really started melting, large fragments would violently drop, creating ghoulish forms on the slab.

A massive pile of potato chips became another canvas, as closet painters in the crowd realized their inner Jackson Pollocks by squirting multi-colored dips from 700 blank paint tubes. An instant Pollock-like drip painting would form, only to disappear from the grubby hands that reached in for a bite of the art.

Rubell extravagantly, and a little obtusely, referenced Vito Acconci's, um, seminal work, Seedbed (in which he pleasured himself under a gallery floor's ramp in 1971 while talking into a loudspeaker about his fantasies of the unseen "viewers" above). A giant gallery that was built out as a massive plywood ramp had bunches of carrots planted in dirt, and foragers had to pluck them from the "earth" and walk to an adjoining room, where they washed them in galvanized tubs of water. There were two other thoughtfully placed bins: one for paper towels and one for composting the discards. It was oddly ritualistic, and maybe the most sublime of the happenings.

All of the snack-work culminated in a strangely mannered feast two floors below in the museum's main hall, set out on nine 10-foot-square plywood volumes in a grid, each a plinth for a dinner course. The reference was supposedly to Joseph Beuys's Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare, but the only real reference was in covering the 100-foot-long tables with gray felt, the medium for which Beuys was famous. What I really saw was a cunning and obvious reference to Donald Judd. (For those who have seen Judd's plywood pieces at Dia: Beacon, imagine them as a buffet service.) The food platforms were right out of an Art Installation 101 class given the precision with which they were covered with massive piles of romaine-lettuce leaves, radishes, a grid formation of turkeys, sides of beef, pigs, or rabbits. Negative space was fully, and beautifully, utilized. Mario Batali, making a special appearance as sous-chef to the artist, juggled cooked rabbits and then carved them up for the carnivorous throngs. After having a mug of martini from a spigot, most people remain ill informed about the art of rabbit carving; as for the other animals on display, the gluttons had to carve for themselves. One of the most captivating sights of the evening was watching well-heeled gentlemen and extravagantly gowned ladies dig into a side of beef with a knife that resembled a sword.

The ball's real purpose was to unveil a somewhat standard museum installation of dresses in a show called "American High Style." All those pretty dresses on all those mannequins (and there were a lot) couldn't hold a fork to Rubell's provoking more than 600 messy pairs of hands to take part in her piece. All participants in Rubell's work seemed satiated by night's end, which culminated in the beating of a 20-foot-high pinata in the form of Andy Warhol's head. It seemed fitting that something as "Pop" as Hostess Twinkies spilled from his mouth. As for watching Andy being pummeled with baseball bats, I grew a little queasy and took it as my cue to exit Rubell's masterful performance, where, on Thursday night in Brooklyn, she secured her unique title as the Food Artist.

Jennifer Rubell, with her head cast in fontina cheese dripping from above.

The cheese heads suspended and melting.

Part of the head that melted and fell onto the platform.

Diane von Furstenberg, also taken with the cheese installation, shooting it with her Canon G11.

A well-heeled gentleman dispenses a dirty martini from one of the "Drinking Paintings."

The wall label from one of the "Drinking Paintings."

Nate Lowman and Rachel Chandler with assorted glasses from which to dispense from the "Drinking Paintings."

The potato-chip mound, with participants channeling their "inner Jackson Pollocks" with multi-colored dips.

The room in which the homage to Vito Acconci's Seedbed was installed. Some foragers are plucking from the carrot patch on the left.

The feast in the great room in the Brooklyn Museum resembled a Donald Judd installation.